The corpus:

-PLEASE DO NOT SHOW THIS PORTFOLIO IN CLASS-

I am comparing two playlists consisting of three artists, one Japanese group and one US playlist. The Japanese group consist of the artists Taeko Onuki, Miki Matsubara and Anri. The US counterparts are the artists Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston and Madonna. I chose these corpora because I want to explore whether there are distinct differences between the genre of (city) pop as it was in Japan in the 80’s vs the pop that was popular in the western world in the same decade. Japanese city pop was influenced by western music, so I expect there to be many similarities in use of sound, instruments and type of rhythms. However, an aspect I am particularly interested whether there is a difference is the prevalence of bass, and rhythms. It is also interesting to see whether there are differences in other aspects like “supplementary” sounds. However, I am unsure to what extent they are different.

As I have chosen three artists to represent their own (variety) of genres, there might be nuances and representations I am missing. Taeko Onuki, Miki Matsubara and Anri were chosen due to their popularity on Spotify (the amount of general listeners as well as listens to their tracks). I also have to mention that there were personal selections. The same method was done in choosing the western counterparts. However, the genre(s) is (are) very broad, despite its popularity, and some varieties might have been overlooked. However, their popularity is a strength.

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Typical, and popular, tracks from the Japanese playlist are:

• “Mayonaka no Door / Stay With Me” - Miki Matsubara
• “4:00A.M.” - Taeko Onuki
• “Remember Summer Days” - Anri

These songs are typical in the sense that there are prominent use of basslines and clear rhythms, and have many “layers” to them.

The western counterparts have typical tracks like:

• “Billie Jean” - Michael Jackson
• “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)”
• “La Isla Bonita” - Madonna

These last three tracks especially has the typical and distinct features of pop of the 80’s, namely the sharp drums and the heavily synthesized piano sounds and, what I think, an almost like a “dreamy” sound to them.

Other differences

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The previous plots made me think that there is more to the differences between city pop and US pop. Danceability for city pop seemed overall lower than for US pop, indicating that there are more differences in their features than I previously thought. Personally, when listening to city pop, I often get a feeling of a certain melancholy, even while you may want to dance. Therefore, I decided to explore these features.

Distribution of valence

Danceability, valence and mode

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Starting with valence, I wanted to see whether there were differences in distributions for the valence in the two groups/playlists. The histogram below does seem to indicate that there is more songs that are considered very happy, but this could be attributed to the fact that the city pop playlist has more songs than in the US Pop playlist. Therefore, I made another scatterplot to explore further.

The graph below show the danceability’s effect on valence, with the shape indicating the mode of the song, i.e., whether it is major or minor. Overall, there seems to be a trend of danceability having an effect on valency in the US group, as there is more of a cluster where the danceability is high and having a high valence. A similar trend seems to be the case in the Japanese group as well. However, whereas many of the songs in the US group has a danceability over 0.8, with high valance, this is not really the case for the other group. Many of the latter’s songs are under 0.8 in danceability, but have a high valence nonetheless. For both groups, there seem to be no striking pattern at first glance for the mode.